This account of an affair between two men who played together on the Washington Redskins in the late '60s/early '70s is heartbreaking. It comes from the NFL Network's episode of A Football Life profiling player Jerry Smith, who remained publicly closeted for his entire life (Smith died of AIDS in 1986).

As his one-time lover and teammate David Kopay explains, "I thought this was really good. At least I was sharing something of myself with someone who's close and understood all that I had been through and understood so much of what we hoped for would come. And that's where we left it." Kopay came out post-retirement as a result of a Washington Star piece anonymously chronicling Smith's hardship as a secretly gay NFL player.